“Please do?”
“I never want to stop.”
I heard him pull in a shaky breath. “I don’t have a plan, Henry,” he said, his voice weak. “For the first time in my life, I have no plan. No routine. Nothing.”
I squeezed him. “And for the first time in your life, you don’t have secrets, either,” I said.
“You’re right.”
“We will get through this,” I told him. “I don’t know how either. But we will.”
14
Sebastian
The next few days in Berrydale were surreal.
Each day was grey and dreary. Snow fell, blew away, and then fell again the next day. We didn’t get even an hour of seeing the sun. Time felt strange, like we were waiting and waiting for a storm to break, but nothing ever happened.
Almost nothing, at least.
Three days after I’d made my public statement, Emma made an official statement. The Princess of Beloria herself was the first royal person to respond.
“I support Prince Sebastian completely and with all of my heart,” she wrote. “We are still very good friends and we will be for life. Wherever Sebastian’s heart leads him, I am proud.”
I teared up as I read her statement in the paper. I called her that afternoon and broke down again, with gratitude for a person who didn’t need to support me but fully did.
Then the day after, something even stranger happened. A prince from a small country called Teralia came out as gay.
And then came out as being very, very interested in me.
It was probably a publicity stunt, but Prince Nathaniel of Teralia appeared on a local TV show in his own kingdom, cracking joke after joke about how much he’d love to end up in my royal castle. He said he’d had a crush on me for years, and never could have dreamed that I’d actually be gay, too.
It was strange, but also incredibly heartwarming.
I wasn’t the only gay prince in the world. It was something I’d always known must be true, but until I saw it right in front of my eyes, it had never felt real.
For once, it felt like I had done something. Impacted the world, in a much larger way than I knew possible. And it started to feel like it may have been worth it.
It wasn’t until a week after my statement that everything exploded.
“Sebastian,” Genoveve called from the front room after a knock on the door. “Your eleven o’clock appointment is here.”
I’d been taking small phone appointments all week. I ignored almost every other request from the media. Genoveve, Henry and I had all agreed that it was the best choice to lay low for a while. But I’d accepted one in-person request, from a small TV news outlet who simply wanted an unbiased view of how I was handling things after leaving the castle. I trusted the reporters, which was rare for me.
The interview was scheduled for tonight. If people were going to talk about me, at least I preferred it being calm, compassionate people talking to me instead of gossip-crazed hounds speculating wildly.
The two reporters, Mallory and David, were at the front door now, and I let them inside and took them to the living room.
“Wow,” Mallory said, looking around. “This is where the Prince of Frostmonte has been living?”
“Yep,” I said plainly. “Just a simple house. But if you wouldn’t mind, I would much rather have the focus of the interview be about my statement, and not at all about my living situation.”
David nodded. “Of course. In fact, Mallory and I had a proposal for you that you’ll hopefully find favorable.”
Mallory sat down. “We want the piece to be a response to your mother’s piece. But not in any sort of attacking way. Not as ‘revenge.’ We simply want the public to hear your side of the story. From you.”
“That’s exactly what I want,” I said. “Nothing catty. Nothing gossipy. Just… my viewpoint.”
“Perfect,” she said, smiling a mega-watt smile. “Let’s get started.”
For the next forty-five minutes, they prepared me for the interview. It was something I’d seen my mother do many times in the castle, but it felt different here in such a small house. The camera crew arrived shortly after the interviewers. Lights were set up. They powdered my face. Henry was incredible and offered everyone the drinks of their choice, watching in awe as they set up.
And finally, it came time to film the interview. It was going to be aired tonight, right in the same time slot that my mother’s interview had been days ago.
The interview questions started out easy. They asked me how I’d been faring in the last few days, in the wake of all of the “controversy” that had been happening. I gave simple answers, making sure that I never disparaged my mother.
Halfway through the interview, however, everything got more difficult. For me, at least.
“What are your plans, going forward?” Mallory asked.
I bit my lower lip. “My only plan is that I don’t want to deny love from my life any longer,” I said. “That includes loving myself and other people. For so long, I’ve ignored who I really am.”
“And we are so glad that you aren’t ignoring it any longer. And there is another man in your life, isn’t there?”
“There is,” I said, swallowing. “For our privacy, I don’t want to focus too much on my relationship. But for the first time in years, I can truly say that I am happy.”
“But the man is not a prince,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was phrasing it as a question or a statement.
“He is not,” I said.
“So you can never marry,” she said, shaking her head. “Under your mother’s new laws, at least.”
I paused. Henry was across the room, watching from the other side of the bright lights. I could barely make out his face, but I didn’t have to. I knew this was the part of the interview he had been dreading.
And I had been dreading it, too.
“As they are written now, I would not be able to marry the man I love.”
“Awful,” Mallory said.
“It is awful,” I said. “But I don’t blame my mother for this.”
“She has the power to change this, though, doesn’t she?”
I nodded. “But Frostmonte runs on tradition,” I said. “It’s how all royalty is. How it always has been.”
“But Prince Sebastian,” Mallory said, her eyes boring into mine. “Your mother has already shown that she is willing to change tradition. No prince has married another prince before, but she’s made it possible.”
Suddenly my clothes felt like they were clinging to my skin. The lights were not only blinding but also hotter than the damned surface of the sun.
“I agree that it is flawed,” I said, clearing my throat.
“What a shame,” she said with a shake of her head as she turned back to the long list of questions in front of her. “Well. In conclusion, what we really want to know is if you’re happy with your life, now that your secret is out. Was it all worth it?”
Her forehead creased with concern as she watched me.
It was funny. I had known all my life that I was some sort of public figure. I had known that tons of people were aware of my existence, even if I wasn’t aware of theirs. And I’d never much cared about that aspect of being a prince. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t dwell on it.